Who is your least favorite?

I have no reason to hate -- or even intensely dislike -- Kissinger

Pol Pot murdered his own people indiscriminately. Kissinger merely fulfilled his duties as foreign minister (pls. note: lower case letters) during a particularly difficult time that this country went through.

The Friends of Pol Pot

by John Pilger

The Nation magazine, May 11, 1998

...

It is all too easy and too dangerous to remember Pol Pot as a unique monster. What is remarkable about the U.S. coverage of his death is the omission of U.S. complicity in his rise to power, a complicity that sustained him for almost two decades. For the truth is that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge would be historical nonentities-and a great many people would be alive today- had Washington not helped bring them to power and the governments of the United States, Britain, China and Thailand not supported them, armed them, sustained them and restored them. In other words, the iconic images of the piles of skulls ought to include those who, often at great remove in distance and culture, were Pol Pot's accessories and Faustian partners for the purposes of their own imperial imperatives.

To hear Henry Kissinger deny recently that the United States and especially the Nixon Administration bore any responsibility for Cambodia's horror was to hear truth denigrated and our intelligence insulted. For Cambodia's nightmare did not begin with Year Zero but on the eve of the U.S. land invasion of neutral Cambodia in 1970. The invasion provided a small group of extreme ethnic nationalists with Maoist pretensions, the Khmer Rouge, with a catalyst for a revolution that had no popular base among the Cambodian people. Between 1969 and 1973, U.S. bombers killed perhaps three-quarters of a million Cambodian peasants in an attempt to destroy North Vietnamese supply bases, many of which did not exist. During one six-month period in 1973, B-52s dropped more bombs on Cambodians, living mostly in straw huts, than were dropped on Japan during all of World War II, the equivalent of five Hiroshimas. Evidence from U.S. official documents, declassified in 1987, leaves no doubt that this U.S. terror was critical in Pol Pot's drive for power. "They are using [the bombing] as the main theme of the propaganda," reported the C.l.A. Director of Operations on May 2, 1973. "This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of a number of young men [and] the propaganda has been most effective among refugees subjected to B-52 strikes."

What Kissinger and Nixon began, Pol Pot completed. Had the United States and China allowed it, Cambodia's suffering could have stopped when the Vietnamese finally responded to years of Khmer Rouge attacks across their border and liberated the country in January 1979. But almost immediately the United States began secretly backing Pol Pot in exile. Direct contact was made between the Reagan White House and the Khmer Rouge when Dr. Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the C.I.A., made a clandestine visit to Pol Pot's operational base inside Cambodia in November 1980. Cline was then a foreign policy adviser to President-elect Reagan. Within a year some fifty C.l.A. and other intelligence agents were running Washington's secret war against Cambodia from the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok and along the Thai-Cambodian border. The aim was to appease China, the great Soviet foe and Pol Pot's most enduring backer, and to rehabilitate and use the Khmer Rouge to bring pressure on the source of recent U. S. humiliation in the region: the Vietnamese. Cambodia was now America's "last battle of the Vietnam War," as one U.S. official put it, "so that we can achieve a better result."

Two U.S. relief aid workers, Linda Mason and Roger Brown, later wrote, "The U.S. government insisted that the Khmer Rouge be fed.. .the U.S. preferred that the Khmer Rouge operation benefit from the credibility of an internationally known relief operation." In 1980, under U.S. pressure, the World Food Program handed over food worth $12 million to pass on to the Khmer Rouge. In that year, I traveled on a U.N. convoy of forty trucks into Cambodia from Thailand and filmed a U.N. official handing the supplies over to a Khmer Rouge general, Nam Phan, known to Western aid officials as The Butcher. There is little doubt that without this support and the flow of arms from China through Thailand the Khmer Rouge would have withered on the vine. If the U.S. bombing was the first phase of Cambodia's holocaust and Pol Pot's Year Zero the second, the third phase was the l use of the United Nations by Washington, its allies and China as the instrument of Cambodia's, and Vietnam's, punishment. With Vietnamese troops preventing the return of the Khmer Rouge and a Hanoi-installed regime in Phnom Penh, a U.N. embargo barred Cambodia from all international agreements on trade and communications, even from the World Health Organization. The U.N. withheld development aid from only one Third World country: Cambodia, which lay unreconstituted from the years of bombing and neglect. For the United States the blockade was total. Not even Cuba and the Soviet Union were treated this way.

If on his deathbed Pol Pot had felt moved to offer thanks to his Western collaborators, he surely would have made special mention of an unworkable U.N. "peace plan" imposed by the West and China in 1992. At the insistence of Washington and Beijing, the Khmer Rouge was included in the U.N. operation as a legitimate "warring faction"; the rationale was that they were far too powerful to be left out. Since then, the argument has been turned upside down. Thanks to the "triumph" of the U.N. in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge has "virtually disappeared." In 1993 the U.N.'s military maps showed that in half of Cambodia Pol Pot had a military advantage he did not have before the U.N. arrived. "You must understand," the U.N. spokesman in Phnom Penh, Eric Falt, told me in 1992, "the peace process was aimed at allowing the Khmer Rouge to gain respectability."

I watched Khmer Rouge officials welcomed back to Phnom Penh by U.N. officials who went to astonishing lengths not to offend them. Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot's henchman who once said that the only mistake the Khmer Rouge had made was not killing enough people, took the salute of U.S. and other U.N. troops as a guest of honor on United Nations Day in Phnom Penh.

The West, with the U.N. as its vehicle, brought to Cambodia elections, the "free market," AIDS and massive corruption, all of it reminiscent of the surreal and violent days in the early seventies when the B-52s were bombing the countryside and the Khmer Rouge was infiltrating the cities and towns. The fact that this process of infiltration is under way again was one of the reasons Cambodia's "second prime minister," Hun Sen, last year attacked the forces and supporters of the "first prime minister," Prince Ranariddh, who in exile had been the leader of the Khmer Rouge-dominated coalition.

Are the Khmer Rouge now finished? I doubt it. The more pertinent question is: Will those foreign governments that backed Pol Pot while wringing their hands now help rebuild the country they helped devastate? Henry Kissinger appeared to answer this when he said, "Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?"


http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Global_Secrets_Lies/Friends_PolPot.html

Pol Pot And Kissinger On war criminality and impunity

by Edward S. Herman

The hunt is on once again for war criminals, with ongoing trials of accused Serbs in The Hague, NATO raids seizing and killing other accused Serbs, and much discussion and enthusiasm in the media for bringing Pol Pot to trial, which the editors of the New York Times assure us would be "an extraordinary triumph for law and civilization" (June 24).

The Politics of War Criminality

There are, however, large numbers of mass murderers floating around the world. How are the choices made on who will be pursued and who will be granted impunity? The answer can be found by following the lines of dominant interest and power and watching how the mainstream politicians, media, and intellectuals reflect these demands. Media attention and indignation "follows the flag," and the flag follows the money (i.e., the demands of the corporate community), with some eccentricity based on domestic political calculations.
This sometimes yields droll twists and turns, as in the case of Saddam Hussein, consistently supported through the 1980s in his war with Iran and chemical warfare attacks on Iraqi Kurds, until his invasion of Kuwait in 1990, transformed him overnight into "another Hitler."

Similarly, Pol Pot, "worse than Hitler" until his ouster by Vietnam in 1979, then quietly supported for over a decade by the United States and its western allies (along with China) as an aid in "bleeding Vietnam," but now no longer serviceable to western policy and once again a suitable target for a war crimes trial. Another way of looking at our targeting of war criminals is by analogy to domestic policy choices on budget cuts and incarceration, where the pattern is to attack the relatively weak and ignore and protect those with political and economic muscle. Pol Pot is now isolated and politically expendable, so an obvious choice for villainization. By contrast, Indonesian leader Suharto, the butcher of perhaps a million people (mainly landless peasants) in 1965-66, and the invader, occupier, and mass murderer of East Timor from 1975 to today, is courted and protected by the Great Powers, and was referred to by an official of the Clinton administration in 1996 as "our kind of guy."

Pinochet, the torturer and killer of many thousands, is treated kindly in the United States as the Godfather of the wonderful new neoliberal Chile.
President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger, who gave the go ahead to Suharto's invasion of East Timor and subsequent massive war crimes there, and the same Kissinger, who helped President Nixon engineer and then protect the Pinochet coup and regime of torture and murder, and directed the first phase of the holocaust in Cambodia (1969-75), remain honored citizens. The media have never suggested that these men should be brought to trial in the interest of justice, law, and "civilization."

U.S./Western Embrace of Pol Pot

The Times editorial of June 24 recognizes a small problem in pursuing Pol Pot, arising from the fact that after he was forced out of Cambodia by Vietnam, "From 1979 to 1991, Washington indirectly backed the Khmer Rouge, then a component of the guerrilla coalition fighting the Vietnamese installed Government [in Phnom Penh]." This does seem awkward: the United States and its allies giving economic, military, and political support to Pol Pot, and voting for over a decade to have his government retain Cambodia's UN seat, but now urging his trial for war crimes.

The Times misstates and understates the case: the United States gave direct as well as indirect aid to Pol Pot-in one estimate, $85 million in direct support-and it "pressured UN agencies to supply the Khmer Rouge," which "rapidly improved" the health and capability of Pol Pot's forces after 1979 (Ben Kiernan, "Cambodia's Missed Chance," Indochina Newsletter, Nov.-Dec. 1991). U.S. ally China was a very large arms supplier to Pol Pot, with no penalty from the U.S. and in fact U.S. connivance-Carter's National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski stated that in 1979 "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot...Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him but China could."

In 1988-89 Vietnam withdrew its army from Cambodia, hoping that this would produce a normalization of relationships. Thailand and other nations in the region were interested in a settlement, but none took place for several more years "because of Chinese and U.S. rejection of any...move to exclude the Khmer Rouge. The great powers...continued to offer the Khmer Rouge a veto," which the Khmer Rouge used, with Chinese aid, "to paralyze the peace process and...advance their war aims." The Bush administration threatened to punish Thailand for "its defection from the aggressive U.S.-Chinese position," and George Shultz and then James Baker fought strenuously to sabotage any concessions to Vietnam, the most important of which was exclusion of Pol Pot from political negotiations and a place in any interim government of Cambodia. The persistent work of the Reagan-Bush team on behalf of Pol Pot has been very much downplayed, if not entirely suppressed, in the mainstream media. The Times has a solution to the awkwardness of the post-1978 Western support of Pol Pot: "All Security Council members...might spare themselves embarrassment by restricting the scope of prosecution to those crimes committed inside Cambodia during the four horrific years of Khmer Rouge.

...

Henry Kissinger's role in the Cambodian genocide, Chile, and East Timor, makes him a first class war criminal, arguably at least in the class of Hitler's Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop, hanged in 1946. But Kissinger has the impunity flowing naturally to the leaders and agents of the victorious and dominant power. He gets a Nobel Peace prize, is an honored member of national commissions, and is a favored media guru and guest at public gatherings.

http://musictravel.free.fr/political/political3.htm

A Quarter Century of U.S. Support for Occupation

East Timor Truth Commission report uses declassified U.S. documents to call for reparations from U.S. for its support of Indonesian invasion and occupation of East Timor from 1975 until U.N. sponsored vote in 1999

National Security Archive provides more than 1,000 documents to East Timor Truth Commission after Bush Administration refuses cooperation

Recently Declassified British Documents Reveal U.K. Support for Indonesian Invasion and Occupation of East Timor. 1975-1976

National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 174

Edited by Brad Simpson
Director, Indonesia-East Timor Documentation Project
For more information contact:
Brad Simpson - 609/751-8206
[email protected]

Posted - November 28, 2005

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB176/index.htm

Genocide in East Timor

Made in the USA

by Michael Steinberg

Z magazine, December 1999

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Asia/GenocideEastTimor_Z.html

Published on Friday, May 17, 2002 by CommonDreams.org

Time for a U.S. Truth Commission on East Timor

by Joseph Nevins

East Timor today stands on the brink of independence, less than three years after it seemed to be on the edge of annihilation. But while the United Nation's formal transfer of power to an independent East Timorese government on May 20 is certainly cause for celebration, it should also be an occasion for reflection on the reasons for East Timor's recent horrors.

Well over 200,000 East Timorese--about one-third of the pre-invasion population--lost their lives as a result of Indonesia's Dec. 7, 1975 invasion and subsequent occupation. Indonesia's military could not have carried out its crimes without the assistance of numerous countries--most significantly that of the United States. Such complicity, along with Washington's debt to the people of East Timor and its obligations to the American public, highlights the need for Congress to establish an independent commission to fully investigate and publicize the U.S. role.

President Gerald Ford and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger met with Indonesia's dictator, Suharto, on Dec. 6, 1975. Suharto was eager to gain American authorization for the planned annexation of East Timor given his country's heavy dependence on U.S. weaponry, which was limited by treaty to defensive use. According to formerly classified meeting transcripts, Ford and Kissinger gave the green light for the invasion. In doing so, they aided and abetted an international crime against peace and violated U.S. law.

In early 1976, an unnamed State Department official explained why Washington condoned Jakarta's actions: "We regard Indonesia as a friendly, non-aligned nation--a nation we do a lot of business with." Similar logic governed the thinking of all subsequent administrations. Washington thus provided billions of dollars in weaponry, military training, and economic assistance--as well as diplomatic cover--to Jakarta during its almost 24-year occupation.

As a final act of state terrorism, the Indonesian military (TNI) and its "militia" proxies launched a systematic campaign of revenge in Sept. 1999 following an overwhelming pro-independence vote in a United Nations-run referendum. In approximately three weeks, they destroyed 70 percent of the territory's buildings and infrastructure, forcibly deported about 250,000 people to Indonesia, and raped untold numbers of women--in addition to massacring at least 2,000.

It was not until Sept. 11, 1999--one week into the final rampage--that President Bill Clinton ended all U.S. support for the TNI. Washington's ambassador to Jakarta at the time, Stapleton Roy, explained why a president who had once called U.S. policy toward East Timor "unconscionable" was so resistant to ending American support for resource-rich Indonesia. "The dilemma is that Indonesia matters and East Timor doesn't," he stated.

It was such thinking that allowed the slaughter in East Timor to go largely unreported in the United States through the early 1990s. But even as coverage picked up in the mid- and late 1990s, press reports and editorials almost never discussed U.S. complicity in the invasion and occupation. The same is true today.

The failure to compel Washington to account for its own misdeeds is one reason why it often disregards international norms and mechanisms, and justifies such behavior in a self-righteous manner. Washington's ongoing refusal to provide Haiti unhindered access to files confiscated by the U.S. military during the 1994 invasion, its use of intimidating tactics to ensure the victory of its favored candidate during the November elections in Nicaragua, and its undermining of the International Criminal Court are just a few of the recent examples.

"If done well a truth commission can change how a country understands and accepts its past, and through that, if it is lucky, helps to fundamentally shape its future," asserts Priscilla Hayner, author of Unspeakable Truths: Confronting State Terror and Atrocity. Truth-telling processes can lead to a more informed, vigilant, and active citizenry--an indispensable component of any democracy worthy of its name.

In November 1999, Richard Holbrooke, at the time the Clinton administration's U.N. ambassador, traveled to Jakarta. "You cannot deal with the future unless you also come to terms with the past," he told Indonesian leaders in reference to the TNI's scorched-earth withdrawal from East Timor. "Accountability is one of the two or three keys to democracy."

East Timor's independence marks an auspicious time to begin putting these lofty words into practice here at home. For reasons of the health of American democracy, the universality of international law, and the inherent worth of all human lives, East Timor--and the U.S. Role in the country's plight--must matter. Congress should ensure that Washington allows full disclosure of, and atones for its role in East Timor's suffering. Only in this manner can the United States begin redeeming itself for its complicity in one of recent history's most horrific chapters.

Joseph Nevins is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Operation Gatekeeper: The Rise of the "Illegal Alien" and the Making of the U.S.-Mexico Boundary. He is currently working on a book about East Timor's "ground zero" in 1999.

http://www.commondreams.org/views02/0517-08.htm

Cambodian genocide


"Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?"-- Henry Kissinger

[Like Sadam Hussein, Pol Pot was a CIA asset. Phase one was US "secret bombing" by Kissinger and Nixon which killed up to 600,000 civilians and paved the way for Phase two: Pol Pot/Khmer Rouge killings from 1975 to 1979 where at least 200,000 people were executed (while estimates of the total number of deaths resulting from Khmer Rouge policies, including disease and starvation, range from 1.4 to 2.2 million out of a population of around 7 million).]

According to Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, the Pol Pot Regime was "a demonstration model of the NSSM 200 policy". The Khmer Rouge could not have made the gains it did in Cambodia without the aid of Kissinger and Nixon. It was the Nixon Administration's bombing of Cambodia that aided the Khmer Rouge in their takeover of Cambodia.


Tarpley and Chaitkin elaborate:
"The most important single ingredient in the rise of the Khmer Rouge was provided by Kissinger and Nixon, through their systematic campaign of terror-bombing against Cambodian territory during 1973. This was called Arclight, and began shortly after the January 1973 Paris Accords on Vietnam. With the pretext of halting a Khmer Rouge attack on Phnom Penh, U.S. forces carried out 79,959 officially confirmed sorties with B-52 and F-111 bombers against targets inside Cambodia, dropping 539,129 tons of explosives. Many of these bombs fell upon the most densely populated sections of Cambodia, including the countryside around Phnom Penh. The number of deaths caused by this genocidal campaign has been estimated at between 30,000 and 500,000. Accounts of the devastating impact of this mass terror-bombing leave no doubt that it shattered most of what remained of Cambodian society and provided ideal preconditions for the further expansion of the Khmer Rouge insurgency, in much the same way that the catastrophe of World War I weakened European society so as to open the door for the mass irrationalist movements of fascism and Bolshevism."

http://www.whale.to/b/pol_pot.html

Could you please tell me your least favorite from these guys in history;
or just rank them in orders of for your most hated to least hated. Thank you.

Pol Pot
Henry Kissinger
Edward VIII
Idi Amin
King Leopold
Bob Novak
Augusto Pinochet

Hated Pol Pot.

Dearly LOVE, respect & admire General Augusto Pinochet.

Hated Pol Pot.

How could you hate such a dear friend of the US, Om,
a guy who helped the US continue its slaughter of SE Asians?

Dearly LOVE, respect & admire General Augusto Pinochet.

You do seem to have a peculiar penchant for loving the most despicable people.

He's a filthy commie. That 's how.

He's a filthy commie. That 's how.

So what you're saying is that the US has no sense of morality at all.
They'll align themselves with anyone, left wing or right wing,

to murder innocents and help others to murder innocents
and amoral OmSig is ready and willing to support it all.

Well, yes: we DID that during the Second World War.

U.S./Western Embrace of Pol Pot

The Times editorial of June 24 recognizes a small problem in pursuing Pol Pot, arising from the fact that after he was forced out of Cambodia by Vietnam, "From 1979 to 1991, Washington indirectly backed the Khmer Rouge, then a component of the guerrilla coalition fighting the Vietnamese installed Government [in Phnom Penh]." This does seem awkward: the United States and its allies giving economic, military, and political support to Pol Pot, and voting for over a decade to have his government retain Cambodia's UN seat, but now urging his trial for war crimes.

The Times misstates and understates the case: the United States gave direct as well as indirect aid to Pol Pot-in one estimate, $85 million in direct support-and it "pressured UN agencies to supply the Khmer Rouge," which "rapidly improved" the health and capability of Pol Pot's forces after 1979 (Ben Kiernan, "Cambodia's Missed Chance," Indochina Newsletter, Nov.-Dec. 1991). U.S. ally China was a very large arms supplier to Pol Pot, with no penalty from the U.S. and in fact U.S. connivance-Carter's National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski stated that in 1979 "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot...Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him but China could."

Our bombing raid over Dresden was singularly horrible,
done at the behest of your hero, your Comrade Stalin,
wherein many, many innocents were killed;

I never supported the Dresden firestorm.

Our bombing raid over Dresden was singularly horrible,
done at the behest of your hero, your Comrade Stalin,
wherein many, many innocents were killed;

I'd like to see you prove that one.

I never supported the Dresden firestorm.

But you supported the firebombing of all those Japanese cities

and the completely amoral use of atomic weapons on civilian populations.

Are you going to try to pin that one on Stalin too?

You've shown yourself to be amoral scum, Dave.
It sure is easy for you to get yourself all confused when you have no moral compass.

The Japs had been brutal.